Kierkegaard vs Hegel
Existence against the system
Venue: Kierkegaard's authorship throughout the 1840s and 50s; Hegel's posthumous influence as state philosophy of Prussia.
The single individual existing in time against the totalising system of Absolute Spirit.
Søren Kierkegaard's entire authorship is, in significant measure, a sustained critique of Hegelianism — which was the dominant philosophical and theological framework of Danish state Lutheranism in his generation. Hegel had died in 1831; what Kierkegaard attacked was the system as received and elaborated by his Danish Hegelian contemporaries (especially H. L. Martensen). The central themes: existence is prior to thought and irreducible to any conceptual system; the individual subject — concrete, temporal, faced with infinite choice — is not absorbed by Absolute Spirit; genuine faith requires a leap that mediated, rational theology cannot reach. *Either/Or* (1843), *Fear and Trembling* (1843), and *Concluding Unscientific Postscript* (1846) are the major statements. The exchange — asymmetric, since Hegel was dead and Kierkegaard worked on Danish disciples — is the founding document of modern existentialism.
Historical Context
Denmark in the 1840s was Hegelian: Bishop Mynster, then Martensen, made Hegelian-style speculative theology the official mode of Danish Lutheran state Christianity. Kierkegaard's critique was as much religious-pastoral as philosophical: he saw the Danish church as cultural Christianity "playing at" Christian faith.
Parties
Existence is prior to and irreducible to thought; the concrete temporal individual cannot be absorbed into a system. Faith is a leap from rational categories into a relation with God that no philosophical system can mediate.
Key arguments
- Existence: thinking abstracts from existing; the existing individual is more than what can be thought about him.
- Subjectivity is truth: in the domain of ethical-religious existence, what matters is the *how* of belief (passion, commitment) more than the *what*.
- The "leap": faith involves a categorial gap that mediating philosophy cannot cross; Abraham's sacrifice cannot be justified by ethics-as-system.
- The Danish-Hegelian fusion of Christianity with the system trivialises both: it makes Christianity a moment in cultural-rational development rather than a personal-eternal demand.
Allied schools
Reality is the rational self-development of Spirit; the apparent oppositions Kierkegaard treats as ultimate (faith vs reason, individual vs universal) are moments to be sublated at higher levels. Christianity, philosophically understood, is the representation of absolute truth in religious form.
Key arguments
- Dialectic: the contradictions Kierkegaard insists on (the absurd, the paradox of faith) are surmountable in speculative thought.
- The individual is not lost in Spirit but realised through participation in objective ethical life (Sittlichkeit) — family, civil society, state.
- Christianity's representational form (Vorstellung) is sublated into the conceptual form of philosophical truth (Begriff) — religion completed in philosophy.
- Kierkegaard's "leap" abandons the harder work of dialectical mediation; it does not transcend reason but refuses it.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Agency: is the individual subject prior to or constituted by larger rational structures?
Time
Time · Direction: does history advance dialectically toward Spirit's self-realisation, or does the individual's existence in time always exceed any systematic account?
Verdict in retrospect
Kierkegaard's critique shaped 20th-century existentialism (Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, the Christian existentialists) and dialectical theology (Barth, Bultmann, Tillich); his rehabilitation in the early 20th century made him one of the founders of post-Hegelian continental thought. The Hegelian project, transformed and inverted (Marx) and rehabilitated in late-20th-century reappraisals (Pippin, Brandom), also persists. The fundamental question — system or existence — remains live.
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Further reading
- Kierkegaard, *Concluding Unscientific Postscript* (1846)
- Hannay, *Kierkegaard* (1982); *Kierkegaard: A Biography* (2001)
- Westphal, *Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript* (1996)